Bringing you the science fiction and fantasy books that you want...one damned episode at a time!

The Once & Future Podcast is a weekly book-centric podcast for readers and writers alike that focuses on all things fantasy and science fiction, talking with today's hottest authors about their books, writing, and general geekery.

I first met Desirina Boskovich at World Fantasy Convention in 2014, when she was celebrating the release of The Steampunk User's Manual with Jeff VanderMeer. She seemed like an thoughtful, intelligent, and quiet person, and I thoroughly enjoyed having conversations with her. Even without having read her fiction, I could tell Desirina had a unique perspective on life.

Her novella Never Now Alwayshas just come out from Broken Eye Books, and I was immediately captured by her prose style. It is an amazing, beautiful, and strange story that I'll concede might not be for everyone, but I found it to be very refreshing and eery, brutal yet comforting in a way. Desirina is a master at using language in a provocative way, plunging the reader directly into the story.

I recently had the opportunity to interview Desirina about her book and her writing. Please welcome her to Once and Future!

Melanie R. Meadors: You have a new novella available now from Broken Eye Books, called Never Now Always. Could you tell us a bit about it? How did the idea develop?

Desirina Boskovich: Never Now Always is a weird novella about children without memories. They are trapped in a vast structure with unemotional alien caretakers, but they don’t know how they came to be there or what happened before. The story centers on one girl named Lolo who begins to remember bits and pieces, and devises a way to hold onto these memories. She remembers her sister and this leads her on a journey to search for her.

The idea that’s central to this for me is not so much the trauma of having forgotten but the trauma of knowing you’ll forget. The loss of self that comes with memories you know you can’t hold. I started there and explored a few scenarios (which I might use in another story) before stumbling my way into this one.

MRM: You have a lot of short fiction out there in the world, on many websites and in magazines. Do you have a favorite piece?

DB: I don’t have one favorite piece, but there are a couple I do feel strongly about. “The Voice in the Cornfield, the Word Made Flesh” in F&SF. “Deus Ex Arca” in Lightspeed Magazine. Those stories feel closest to my authentic voice and the kind of work I aspire to do. My most popular story is “Heaven Is A Place on Planet X,” which has gotten more response than anything else I’ve written.

MRM: Never Now Always is your debut novella. Did you find that the shift to longer work needed a different writing mindset? Did you plan on this being a longer work or did it just turn out that way?

DB: It was always intended to be a novella. I have written novels before, although I haven’t sold any, and I think I approached it more as a short novel than as a long short story. Now if I could approach a novel like a long novella, I might actually have something.

MRM: Never Now Always is considered one part science fiction, one part horror, and all weird. Could you help readers understand what “weird” fiction is? What are some examples?

DB: It’s a good question. Of course, the answer is probably different for each person. For me, weird fiction challenges the boundaries of what is real and what is speculative. It takes the world I know and puts a strange filter on it. Or it takes a world totally unlike the world I know and makes it feel terribly, startlingly familiar.

Weird fiction explores the ragged edges of everything. And I tend to think it reflects a certain worldview: that there is no “real world.” The objective universe is bizarre and uncanny and stranger than we can possibly imagine. There are a million unseen currents flowing beneath and around and through the happenings of everyday.

Sometimes when we confront the strangeness shot through everything it’s horrifying and sometimes it’s beautiful, and it always makes us feel like we’re losing our footing, like we aren’t what we thought we were, and neither is this place. That’s the feeling I’m searching for whether I’m writing science fiction, fantasy or horror, and so it all tends to mix together.

Brian Evenson is one of my favorite writers of weird fiction and I think he has a particular skill for presenting a seemingly mundane scene, and infusing it with this outsized dread and horror and anxiety, a feeling so powerful it feels like it has to be caused by something supernatural. It’s like in a nightmare -- if you’ve ever had a nightmare where you’re just utterly gutted with horror and dread about something, and then you wake up and try to articulate why it was so scary, but it’s not the thing, it’s your feeling about the thing.

MRM: Your novella, I would say, has a strong voice to it. Is this something that just comes naturally to you, or is it something you’ve worked to hone over the years?

DB: Actually, the most challenging part of writing this novel was developing the voice, which I think is different from the voice of much of my previous work.

The voice I’ve aspired to in much of my work tends to be factual and understated, evocative yet sparse. I want to write like an iceberg, 90 percent of it under the surface.

The novella is written in a much more stream-of-consciousness style. I felt the only to make it work was to put the reader as close to the mindset of my main character Lolo as possible and I wanted to pull the reader into that feeling of disorientation. It’s hard though because Lolo has very few reference points; her narrative resists chronology and she has so few metaphors to draw on. I kept trying to write and feeling the voice was too bland and too forced. I had a few false starts.

I wanted this stream-of-consciousness to be dense, vivid, lyrical, both sort of wise and naive, surreal and whimsical and also true, like Bjork concluding her explanation of how television works with the too-real remark “You shouldn’t let poets lie to you.”

I thought Lolo was like someone who learned lots of words from books but doesn’t exactly know how to use them. And in a way I unlocked it by thinking about how I feel when I have brain fog, which used to happen fairly often when I was dealing with a chronic illness; how I would mentally reach for a word or a phrase and come up with something close but off. Then just say it that way because I was too tired to keep trying to think of it. That’s how Lolo’s mind is working as she struggles to surface from the fog of false memory and achieve clarity.

MRM: Your writing tends toward the “anything but typical” side. Do you ever struggle with questioning, “What if this never sells?” or “What if this doesn’t reach anyone?” Do you have any advice for someone who has some self-doubt about their work?

DB: I do get frustrated sometimes because it seems that the stories I’m most proud of can be hardest to sell; of course when I do work that I like, I want people to read it.

The truth is I’ve tried to write novels that I think could be easy and commercially successful, but as soon as I start working on it and fall in love with it, I want to make it as good as I can, and I want to make it my own. And then it just gets weirder and weirder and stops being the easy thing I thought it could be. And then I’m like “I’m not a good enough writer to even do this” and in other news, I currently have zero published novels to my name.

But the good news is, I don’t depend on my fiction to pay the bills, so I have all the time in the world to write the best and truest story that I can, and I think that’s really the most important thing. Go to the core of yourself, face the things that terrify you, explore your deepest darkest places. Write from your heart and your gut and your scars. Write the story only you could write.

Because otherwise, why even bother?

MRM: You attended the Clarion Writer’s Workshop, which gets a lot of praise. What was your experience there? Is this something you’d recommend to budding writers?

DB: Oh, man. Yes. 100%. The experience was absolutely essential to my writing and my fiction career. I can still recall at least a half-dozen pieces of writing advice I received during those six weeks that probably saved me years of shitty drafts. I started writing fantasy because of Clarion; before I was solidly sci-fi. I sold three of the six stories I workshopped there, all to pro markets (my first sales). I learned about genre stuff like cons and fandom and what JJA’s rejection letters meant, all of which I had literally never heard about before (I knew nothing about fandom). And several of the teachers I met there have remained my supporters and mentors throughout the years and their help and kindness has been so, so valuable. Clarion was life-changing for me.

MRM: Do you have any writing rituals that help you get in the mood to create stories? What is your workspace like?

DB: My perfect writing ritual is this: wake up early in the morning as the sun is just rising, get my coffee, don’t look at email, and begin chipping away at the story as I sip my coffee and become awake. When I do this and it’s quiet and no one interrupts me I can get a couple thousand words down. Unfortunately I have a husband and two dogs and an addiction to email so this literally never happens.

I work from home as a communications consultant so I have to work hard to build a division between the creative work I do for pay and the creative work I do for myself. I find that when I’m working for a client I like to be sitting at a desk and generally being professional, but when I’m writing fiction I like to be very comfortable, like sitting in bed comfortable. Somehow that takes me out of a self-aware and environment-aware state and into the interior state where my fiction actually starts to flow.

During the winter I was having a bit of a breakdown and I built a blanket fort in my office, complete with a lamp and pillows and tissues and snacks. This was a really fantastic place to write. It was especially fantastic because it was very difficult to crawl in and out of, so if I turned off the router before I went in, I couldn’t get internet without going through a whole bunch of rigmarole. After a while I took it down because in my somewhat distraught state I had used very dirty blankets to build the fort and the interior stank very badly of musty dog.

This winter, when it gets cold again, I may have to re-build the blanket fort, but I also have a new puppy now so it might be a learning curve to teach her not to trash my writing tent on a daily basis. We’ll see.

MRM: Have you read anything recently you’d recommend to readers?

DB: “The Ice Twins” by S. K. Tremayne. Brilliant atmosphere and prose styling, disturbing plot. I’m still thinking about it and I’m not sure how I feel about it, but I consider that a sign of a worthwhile read.

Desirina Boskovich's short fiction has been published in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Nightmare, F&SF, Kaleidotrope, PodCastle, Drabblecast, and anthologies such as Aliens: Recent Encounters, The Apocalypse Triptych, and Tomorrow's Cthulhu. Her nonfiction pieces on music, literature, and culture have appeared in Lightspeed, Weird Fiction Review, the Huffington Post, Wonderbook, and The Steampunk Bible. She is also the editor of It Came From the North: An Anthology of Finnish Speculative Fiction (Cheeky Frawg, 2013), and together with Jeff VanderMeer, co-author of The Steampunk User's Manual (Abrams Image, 2014). Find her online at www.desirinaboskovich.com.

Todd Keisling has been on a list of "horror authors to keep an eye on" for some time now, and when one reads his fiction, there's little doubt as to why. His newest collection of short fiction, Ugly Little Thingsis now out from Crystal Lake Publishing, and is not to be missed. Here, he tells us a little of his ugly path to publication--which isn't so horrible after all.

I’ve never done things the “right” way.

When I was a kid, I’d always get low scores in math class. I could find the right answer, but not the way my teachers showed me. When I was in high school, I stopped reading the assigned texts because I was writing my own book. I’ll never forget my English teacher’s befuddled expression when I told him. I think it was the last thing he expected, and when I dropped a manuscript on his desk a month later, I think I perplexed him even more.

But that’s me. That’s how I’ve always been, to the dismay of my parents, my teachers, the many bosses I’ve had over the course of many day jobs in the last 15+ years. That attitude, or maybe that degree of stubbornness, has clung to me for most of my life. I’ve always followed my own path, on my own terms.

My recently published collection, Ugly Little Things: Collected Horrors, is a perfect example of this. Around the end of 2012, just after the publication of my second novel, I decided I needed a break from writing novels. My second book took me almost four years to write, and in that time, I focused on nothing else but that one story. I was tired, I was drained, and I was hungry for something different.

Until that point, I hadn’t written much short fiction since college. After getting my degree, I wanted to tackle big projects, something that could land me an agent, get me a six-figure publishing deal, and kick-start my writing career. Sure, I tackled the big projects and I started to build a following, but not much else materialized. Frustrated and depressed, I turned away from long fiction and looked at creating a collection of shorter work, something along the same lines of King’s “Night Shift” or Barker’s “Books of Blood.”

So, I did. Remember that depression I mentioned above? That was my fuel, and it shows. By the end of 2013, I’d written one short piece and three novelettes, all representing some of the darkest fiction I’d ever crafted. Those first four stories—what would become the original run of “Ugly Little Things”—are so bleak and gut-wrenching that I have a hard time revisiting them, because I remember the pain that birthed them. By the end of that year, I was in a pretty dark place, and for the first time in my life, I seriously considered stepping away from writing altogether.

Fortunately, I have some awesome friends who were supportive and encouraging, and at their suggestion, I released those four stories as standalone Kindle single titles. They became bestsellers, were received well by reviewers, and laid the groundwork for what would come next.

Near the end of 2014, I compiled those first four tales and several other unreleased stories from my college years into a limited edition hardcover through my publishing company, Precipice Books. I wanted to test the waters as a specialty press, but before signing on any other authors, I decided to use my own work as a test subject. If my idea failed, at least no one else would be at risk. The result was “Ugly Little Things: Volume One,” a 50-count hardcover run that sold out. Apparently, my business plan was solid, so I moved on to my next publishing project, Anthony J. Rapino’s Greetings from Moon Hill, a book that would take up the better part of two years from start to finish.

In that time, I began receiving requests from readers who were just starting to discover my work, asking if they could get the ULT stories in paperback. I was busy with Tony’s project, so I didn’t have the time or resources to make a paperback run a reality. Toward the end of 2015, at the suggestion of my good friend Mercedes M. Yardley, I pitched ULT to Joe Mynhardt at Crystal Lake Publishing. It was a long shot—he wasn’t actively accepting submissions, but I’d worked with him in the past on Crystal Lake’s non-fiction anthology, Writers on Writing, and we seemed to have a good rapport, so…I threw caution to the wind. I told him that I’d write a second volume for him if he’d pick up the rights to the first volume. He said he couldn’t promise anything, but would take a look at the manuscript.

A few months later (spring 2016 by this point), Joe contacted me about ULT. He loved it and said he wanted to publish it—if I could wait until 2017, that is. He was booked solid until then. I had no problem with that. A year would give me plenty of time to write a second volume. Eventually, we’d decide to combine the two volumes into a single title.

So, in the summer of 2016, I signed a deal with Crystal Lake Publishing. Earlier this year, I signed a representation agreement with Gandolfo, Helin & Fountain Literary Management. If you’re keeping score, I went from being a self-published author to being a hybrid author with a literary agent in the span of about four years.

Along the way, people told me that if I self-published anything, I would fail.

People told me that if I wrote horror, I would fail.

People told me that I’d never get an agent.

People told me that no one would ever want to publish anything I write because it’s shit.

I ignored those people because they were trying to steer me off a path I wanted to travel. If I failed, I’d do it on my own terms. And if I succeeded, I’d have the satisfaction of knowing I made my own path to get there.

So, I kept writing. I kept moving forward. I did things my way.

TODD KEISLING is the author of A Life Transparent, The Liminal Man (a 2013 Indie Book Award Finalist), and the critically-acclaimed novella, The Final Reconciliation. He lives somewhere in the wilds of Pennsylvania with his wife, son, and trio of unruly cats.

His latest book, Ugly Little Things: Collected Horrors, is available now from Crystal Lake Publishing.

It's been 80 years sinceThe Hobbitwas released into the world, and I'm hard pressed to think of a book (other than its counterpart, The Lord of the Rings) that has been as influential to the fantasy genre as it has been. Because it is required reading in many schools across the United States, it is many kids' first exposure to fantasy. It's the gateway drug in many cases, leading to a lifelong addiction to reading and escaping to magical worlds of dragons, adventure, treasure, friendship, and more.

The Hobbit also introduces the reader to ways of dealing with adversity, and how different groups and races of people can come together to fight for a common goal. It shows how even the smallest of us can accomplish great things.

I'm always happy when I see that an author is just as delightful as their books make them out to be, and this was certainly the case with this interview. Lana Popović is the author of Wicked Like a Wildfire, her debut young adult fantasy novel that deals with using magic to manipulate beauty. The story itself is told beautifully, with lush, magical prose and a setting readers can get lost in. It's a tale of sisters and love, magic, emotion, and beauty, which doesn't shy away from showing the dark side of all of these things. It also explores the contradictions young women experience as they grow, "Be beautiful, but not too beautiful." "Be powerful but don't scare people away." "Be independent, but at the same time submissive..." It's a book that is sure to strike a chord with many.

Please welcome Lana Popović to the blog!

Melanie R. Meadors/The Once and Future Podcast: Congratulations on your new novel, Wicked Like a Wildfire, from HarperCollins! Could you tell us a bit about it?

Lana Popović: Thank you, and of course! It’s a young adult contemporary fantasy, about witchy twin sisters with the gift of manipulating beauty through magic. When their mother is attacked and left hovering between life and death, they begin to unravel a thousand-year-old family curse, which forces them to face the secrets they’ve kept hidden and see how far they’ll go to protect each other.

MRM: Was there something in particular you came across while writing your novel that make you “geek out,” whether a bit of research or a setting, etc?

LP: Right before I wrote the book, I visited Montenegro to refresh my childhood memories of all the stunning scenery (and ridiculously delicious food!) I remembered from childhood summer spent there. From the votive shrine at Our Lady of the Rocks—which looks like something out of Mists of Avalon—to monasteries carved from cliffsides, it’s a place that just brims with ancient magic.

I also had a chance to deep-dive into the world of handmade perfumes, which I mostly did courtesy of Aroma Sanctum in Salem and Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab. I learned about essentials versus absolutes—and accords! Those are a thing too!—and though I still don’t make my own perfumes, I’ve gotten to see real masters of the craft spin out such delicate, intricate scents that it’s basically magic.

MRM: Your book has a very lyrical, fairy-tale-like voice to it. Is this something you have worked at consciously, or did the story just come out that way?

LP: This story very much wanted to sound like a fairytale. I tried tweaking the voice closer to contemporary a number of times, both while drafting and revising, but it never sounded right to me when it veered more modern.

MRM: You’ve been educated at Yale and Boston University, studying psychology, literature, and law. You’ve also studied writing and publishing at Emerson College. How would you respond to someone putting down YA as easy or being brainless drivel?

MRM: Do you plot your work out beforehand? Or do you write by the seat of your pants?

LP: I’m an absolute pantser. I have the arc in mind, and certain scenes that I know will happen and that I look forward to writing, but the space between them is often surprising and unpredictable. I do keep a document for the thoughts, sense impressions, and sentences I come up with while in the shower (what’s with that, anyway? We all seem to write in the shower!), but it could only very loosely be described as an outline.

MRM: What is your workspace like? Do you write anywhere in particular? Do you have any writing rituals?

LP: I like to work snuggled up with lots of pillows, so I’m either on the couch or in bed—unless I’m on a tight deadline, and then I write anywhere I can sit down. I also like to burn sandalwood incense while I write, and have a teensy bit of wine ☺

MRM: You’ve lived in several different countries, from Bulgaria, to Romania, Hungary, the US. Do you have a favorite place, or a place that feels more like home than another?

LP: I’ve now lived in Boston for thirteen years, which is longer than I’ve lived anywhere else, and I know this city better than any other. This is home now, I think!

MRM: How has being a literary agent affected your writing? Do you ever second guess yourself as an author because of knowing what happens on the other side of the business (for example, let a marketing issue nag you when you are making a writing choice)?

LP: So far, it’s actually been helpful to know the market. I usually start writing without overthinking the premise, but I do bear in mind whether a certain story just isn’t likely to sell before I begin drafting. When I revise, I *think* agenting also allows me to be a little more pragmatic in recognizing problem areas and killing off my darlings without losing all that much sleep about it. #ruthless

MRM: I absolutely love the first paragraph of your book. A lot of authors agonize over their openings. What is your process like to get the beginning just right?

LP: Thank you! It’s one of my favorite scenes, and it’s also the only one in the book that didn’t change at all during editing—the rest of the story is about 70% different from the first draft. I don’t know that I have a particular process for this, though. If I do, it’s something like, “sit down, write a paragraph, agonize over word choices for some hours, see if you still think it’s pretty when you read it the next day, then move on.”

MRM: Your book deals a lot with the subject of beauty. It can be really hard for teenagers to have a healthy perspective on their own beauty—they are going through a lot of changes, both inside and out, and so much of their identity can be wrapped up in their outer appearance. Is there any advice you would give to a teenager who is having a hard time feeling attractive?

LP: I have a lot of feelings about this! I was an awkward-looking kid; glasses, braces, the standard redhead blond-eyelashes deal, with the added misfortune of a gorgeous mother (who’s also a lovely person, so you can’t even be annoyed by all that symmetry). I didn’t look much like her at the time—apparently we share some bone structure, but it took another solid ten years for it to see the light of day—and I heard about it constantly, usually along the lines of, “wow, your mother’s so beautiful! You look nothing like her, that’s weird.” I remember feeling both very hurt and really annoyed by this reaction, and to this day it stings that being pretty was of such paramount importance that the other things I was good at—school, jokes, making badass nachos with Doritos—seemed to pale into oblivion in comparison. To teens feeling this way, I offer all the hugs, and the assurance that it gets so much better. It really does. There are a million different ways to be beautiful that don’t entail looking like a Victoria’s Secret Angel (although kudos to those ladies. They work hard). All the “clichés” we hear about inner beauty are true, turns out! Be bold. Be creative. Be kind. Make stuff, love people fiercely, don’t be afraid to be tender or to ask for help. It’s all going to be so much more awesome than you think, I promise.

MRM: When creating the magic for your story world, did you get inspiration from anything in particular?

LP: I looked up so many flowers. So. Many. (The chocolate cosmos is still my all-time favorite flower name—it sounds divine.) I also spent hours browsing through fractal art, particularly suicidebysafetypin on DeviantArt, and watching unsettling and cool videos of polyphonic singing.

MRM: What were some of your favorite books to read when you were a teen?

LP: I had odd, eclectic taste as a young reader, largely based on what was available in the vicinity, in English. I ended up reading a lot of Sidney Sheldon (at way too young an age, shudder), Stephen King, Diana Gabaldon, and Robert Heinlein.

Photo credit: Gary Alpert

MRM: Thanks so much for your time, and best of luck with your new book! I hope it’s the first of many delightful books we’ll see from you!

LP: Thank you so much—I hope so, too! The sequel, Fierce Like a Firestorm, is out next summer, and I have some ideas for after, too!

About the Author:

Lana Popović was born in Serbia and spent her childhood summers in Montenegro. She lived in Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania before moving to the United States, where she now calls Boston home. She works as a literary agent with Chalberg & Sussman, specializing in Young Adult literature. Visit her website at www.lanapopovicbooks.com.

Today, September 19th, is International Talk Like a Pirate Day! And what better way to celebrate than to read a good swashbuckling book? We performed a survey on social media to find out what people's favorite pirate books are, and here are some of the results!

Years ago, long before I was published, my writing group the Dorks of the Round Table coined a very insightful and totally unique motto: “Writing is hard.”

The whinier it is said, the better. Especially if you drag out the last word and it devolves into a sobbing cry. At best, short stories are annoying buzzing insects set upon this world to distract us fantasists from our BIG BOOK DEADLINES.

Regardless of the motto’s origin, it holds true, more so if you’re the type of writer, like me, who jumps back and forth from novels (seven) to short stories (a baker’s dozen or so). Despite the deadlines on the novels, I find myself compelled sometimes to throw on the hand brake, halt the big book steam train, and go off the rails into the uncharted territory of the short story. Over time, it has become a more familiar landscape to visit, but lordy, is it a different terrain than that of the long form.

The long form allows you to take your time, meander a bit in your storyline. Not to say that you’re seeding filler throughout your novel-length work, mind you. You just simply have more time to develop and expand upon ideas that you can pay out over the long haul of 100,000 words.

The short story? Not so much.

There is a mental changing of gears that happens when I approach a short story, which really isn’t a shocker; there just has to be. The long form approach doesn’t exactly fit the structure of high-risk-high-reward-in-a-small-space that a short story is trying to accomplish. In the short story, you stoke the coal fire hard and it’s full steam ahead from moment one. They are the grandest exercises in brevity, of being concise. Where to begin it, where it leaves you, how much punch can be packed into 5,000-7,000 words…

You’re capturing a moment in time, and in my approach, it’s all about writing a particular moment of a much longer tale without showing too much inclusion of that greater tale. As the author, I have to know what leads up to the moment of the story I’m about to tell you, and what happens after it, but rarely do I show all that. All that unseen world-building merely becomes the color of my short story, coming in hints, dialogue and pieces of that world layered into the story. The meandering mind of the novel has to shut down as the brevity machine kicks in. It’s a different set of mental gears that come into play to do that.

The greater question is why—why stop the big book machine at all? What makes me take time away from my novel-length work to write a short story? Sometimes those stories are elements of the big book that simply don’t fit into the novel-length work. They’re cool ideas that pop into my head, and would be awesome scenes, but on closer examination they prove to be a distraction to the thrust of the novel and therefore have to be removed. Some fall to the cutting room floor and others blossom into short tales outside the scope of the novel.

For example: The world of the Simon Canderous paranormal detective books has an agency that has investigated the paranormal throughout the ages. In building that element of the book world I knew that some of our real world history was a part of it, but to stop and tell the tale of Benjamin Franklin, Necromancer would definitely put the brakes on the book if I included it (this was way before Abe Lincoln fancied himself a vampire hunter, mind you). Instead, that world-building moment became the tale “The Fourteenth Virtue” in The Dimension Next Door anthology. This and the rest of my tie-in short stories give an added depth to their related novels, like adding salt and pepper to flavor to a soup. The short stories aren’t the main ingredient, but they do spice things up.

Then there are the short stories that become something greater, as in the case of “Stanis” from the Spells of the City anthology. I knew I wanted to do a creator/creature tale set in the modern world, and with a love of gargoyles I set out to write just that. “Stanis” is the simple meeting of a young artist and the gargoyle set to watch over her family generations ago. The story takes place over the span of maybe a half hour of time, but there’s a lot of the story’s past crammed in there. In trying to unravel how this artist and gargoyle arrived at their interaction on one particular night, I realized there was a lot more I wanted to explore after figuring out the backstory that barely appears in the short.

I turned the story in, but it continued to gnaw at the back of my mind until I started laying out a novel based around that one scene—everything that led to that meeting and everything that would come because of it. From there that short story became Alchemystic, book one of The Spellmason Chronicles, and grew to three books total based on it. I started with a moment, pulled the camera back on it to reveal more and more until three books later I wrapped it up in the third book of the series, Incarnate, where we see the satellite picture of the world as it has been affected by the moment-to-moment of all these events.

I don’t honestly prefer one over the other. It would be like comparing steak to ice cream—both food, but so inherently different it’s okay to love both completely. For the novel-length work, every book goes from moment to moment, and those moments build on each other like a Voltron of story goodness. In the short story you’re giving one moment, hyper infused with all the moments before it and all the moments to come after. The two forms couldn’t be more opposite, but for me, the shifting of mental gears never leaves a dull moment to be had in either.

Want to win a signed copy of Spells of the City, the anthology that contains Anton Strout's story, "Stannis"? Enter here!

Fantasy and science fiction author Anton Strout has given readers equal shares of chills and laughter since the first book of his Simon Canderous paranormal detective series, Dead To Me, came out from Penguin/Ace Books in 2008. He continues his tales of mayhem in Manhattan with his second series, the Spellmason Chronicles, as he treats readers to the story of a girl and her gargoyle, and explores themes of friendship, loyalty, and love with his trademark snarky twist.

The Once & Future Podcast is his latest project, where he endeavors as Curator of Content to bring authors to listener's ear holes one damned episode at a time..

In his scant spare time, his is a writer, a sometimes actor, sometimes musician, occasional RPGer, and the worlds most casual and controller smashing video gamer. He currently works in the exciting world of publishing and yes, it is as glamorous as it sounds.

When New Horizons did its historic flybys of Pluto last year, scientists and civilians alike were delighted to see so many features on Pluto's surface that had, up to that point, never been seen before. We were finally able to cross the bridge from imagining what Pluto looked like to being able to see it with our own eyes (well, New Horizon's eyes!). And now, those newly discovered features have names.

Most of us know that the craters, volcanoes, and other features on bodies like the Moon, Mars, and Mercury have names. Olympus Mons, Mare Tranquillitatis, and so forth. But how do those things get their names?

Well, there is an official committee called the Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature (WGPSN), which is part of the International Astronomers Union (IAU). Names for the features are submitted to them, and then they approve them. Some names for Pluto's features were suggested by NASA and the New Horizons team, others by the public as part of the Our Pluto campaign.

“We’re very excited to approve names recognising people of significance to Pluto and the pursuit of exploration as well as the mythology of the underworld. These names highlight the importance of pushing to the frontiers of discovery,” said Rita Schulz, chair of the WGPSN. “We appreciate the contribution of the general public in the form of their naming suggestions and the New Horizons team for proposing these names to us.”

Among the names approved were those of scientists who spent their lives studying the far reaches of our solar system.

“The approved designations honour many people and space missions who paved the way for the historic exploration of Pluto and the Kuiper Belt, the most distant worlds ever explored,” said Alan Stern, New Horizons Principal Investigator from the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado.

Tombaugh Regio honours Clyde Tombaugh (1906–1997), the U.S. astronomer who discovered Pluto in 1930 from Lowell Observatory in Arizona.

Burney crater honors Venetia Burney (1918–2009), who as an 11-year-old schoolgirl suggested the name “Pluto” for Clyde Tombaugh’s newly discovered planet. Later in life she taught mathematics and economics.

Sputnik Planitia is a large plain named after Sputnik 1, the first space satellite, launched by the Soviet Union in 1957.

Tenzing Montes and Hillary Montes are mountain ranges honouring Tenzing Norgay (1914–1986) and Sir Edmund Hillary (1919–2008), the Indian/Nepali Sherpa and New Zealand mountaineer who were the first to reach the summit of Mount Everest and return safely.

Al-Idrisi Montes honours Ash-Sharif al-Idrisi (1100–1165/66), a noted Arab mapmaker and geographer whose landmark work of medieval geography is sometimes translated as “The Pleasure of Him Who Longs to Cross the Horizons.”

Djanggawul Fossae defines a network of long, narrow depressions named for the Djanggawuls, three ancestral beings in indigenous Australian mythology who travelled between the island of the dead and Australia, creating the landscape and filling it with vegetation.

Sleipnir Fossa is named for the powerful, eight-legged horse of Norse mythology that carried the god Odin into the underworld.

Virgil Fossae honors Virgil, one of the greatest Roman poets and Dante’s fictional guide through hell and purgatory in the Divine Comedy.

Adlivun Cavus is a deep depression named for Adlivun, the underworld in Inuit mythology.

Hayabusa Terra is a large land mass saluting the Japanese spacecraft and mission (2003–2010) that returned the first asteroid sample.

Voyager Terra honours the pair of NASA spacecraft, launched in 1977, that performed the first “grand tour” of all four giant planets. The Voyager spacecraft are now probing the boundary between the Sun and interstellar space.

Tartarus Dorsa is a ridge named for Tartarus, the deepest, darkest pit of the underworld in Greek mythology.

Elliot crater recognises James Elliot (1943–2011), an MIT researcher who pioneered the use of stellar occultations to study the Solar System — leading to discoveries such as the rings of Uranus and the first detection of Pluto's thin atmosphere.

More names are yet to come, and of course, the future holds even more discoveries that will need names. Keep studying and supporting science and who knows? Maybe some day, one of them will be named after you!

Jon Hollins is celebrating a book release today! The Dragon Lords: False Idols is the second book in his Dragon Lords series afterFool's Gold, and it looks like the best of both worlds of fun and fantasy. Publisher's Weekly says that "Fans of humorous fantasy will enjoy the outrageous yet cunning plot twists of this comedy with an edge sharp enough to cut dragon scales."

Jon joins us as our guest today, talking about something we would know NOTHING about here at the Once and Future website...ok, who am I kidding. You've seen our DuckTales love and what we stand for here. Let's hear it for Saturday morning cartoons!

An Elaborate Defense of my Weekend Plans, by Jon Hollins

As much as I want to, I’m afraid I just can’t sit here and defend Saturday morning cartoons as high art. I’d love to tell you the colors of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ eye bands map back to the predominant colors used by their artist namesakes, but quite frankly, I just made that up, and I can’t imagine it bearing out if you bothered to research it. Saturday morning cartoons are fluff, pure and simple.

There again, that’s exactly why I love them.

I came to Saturday morning cartoons pretty late in life. My parents were pretty strict when it came to TV hours (and bless them for it, because that’s where a lot of my love of reading comes from, which is where my love of writing comes from, which is why I get to waste your time with all of this today). I have my eighties favorites, of course. Transformers is still the greatest franchise to bless the face of the earth, no matter what Michael Bay has done to it. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles will always be my co-pilots. However, it wasn’t until I was in my early twenties and my wife was working a job that required Saturday morning hours that I really got to fully dig into the genre. Jackie Chan adventures, Yu-Gi-Oh, and Static Shock, oh my.

There isn’t much to the Saturday cartoon. That’s not a criticism, by the way. Just a comment. The formula has stayed pretty much the same since Hot Rod and Bumblebee first pushed Hasbro toys into my fumbling eight-year old fingers. It goes like this: you get your gang of friends and family together, someone screws up, hijinks ensue. And then, at the end of the show, everything is back to normal, and we’re ready to roll into next week’s episode.

The simplicity of these cartoons makes them easy to criticize. This is mental taffy: it’s fun, it’s bright, it’s flavorful, and it leaves nothing of value behind in the system. Except… well, I know I just set up that straw man argument, but I don’t see anybody else around here’s who’s going to knock it down.

At a basic level, there’s always been a shallow level didacticism in Saturday morning cartoons. Going back to the formula: someone in the gang usually screws up. That’s how things get started. In fixing the situation, that character usually learns the error of their ways. They’ll probably screw up again, and have to learn the lesson again (there are 20+ episodes each season, you have to give those writers a break), but along the way we learn with these characters. And because of that lesson, hopefully parents don’t feel too bad about using the TV as a babysitter for three or four hours.

I’m being flippant here, because these lessons are flippant. They really are the most shallow part of these cartons, and I don’t think many of the values I hold today, I hold because Michelangelo learned that sharing the pizza was important.

Saturday morning cartoons do teach some lessons more effectively, though. Going back to the structure one more time (I’m sorry, I’m a structure nerd, writing has done bad things to me): someone in the gang screws up. The gang. It may be friends, it may be family, it could be a bunch of stoners hanging out in a van trying to solve mysteries. Whoever it is, there’s a bunch of people there who love and care for each other. And where one of their members screws up, or gives into a weakness, or indulges a foible, they rally together and they sort things out. And, yes, I get that isn’t a profound lesson, but Saturday morning cartoons teach it profoundly. The loyalty of friends and family is ingrained in their DNA. You cannot help but soak it in. Friends are there for friends. Family is there for family. This is the sort of stuff that knits societies together, and as I look around at this world, that sort of empathy seems more and more important to me.

And still, beyond even that, there is a more simple reason I love Saturday morning cartoons. Beyond their obvious lessons, and their implicit assumptions about the world. It’s something integral to their existence, and it is this: Saturday morning cartoons are fluff; Saturday morning cartoons are mental taffy; Saturday morning cartoons are just fun.

When I first graduated college, I noticed an odd thing: I wasn’t finishing any books I started to read. I would abandon almost all of them halfway through, sometimes earlier. And when I figured out why, I felt pretty stupid.. I was reading the sorts of things, I thought I was supposed to read. I was reading the books that I thought would make me smarter, would make me think about the world more deeply, or make me more educated on subjects. I had stopped reading for fun.

I think it’s easy to become very self-conscious about what we do for fun. We don’t want to be uncool. We don't want to be shallow. And, yes, I get that trying to become smarter, and thinking about the world more deeply, and getting more educated are all important, noble things to do, but they aren’t the only things we should try to do. They are not everything. We get just one shot at life, and there will be plenty of teleconferences along the way. It’s up to us to make sure we have some fun too. And sometimes, it can be pure, and Technicolor, and watched on TV with a bowl of Fruit Loops on your lap.

So I still can’t defend Saturday morning cartoons as high art, but I can still defend them. Saturday morning cartoons are great. And they aren’t great because of the lessons they try to teach, or the values they implicitly embody. They are great because they are unapologetically fun. They are dumb, and goofy, but they are fun. It’s their raison d’etre. And yes, I’m using French so you can justify yourself to judgmental friends when you emerge bleary-eyed, with Cheetos in your beard at midday, but I am passionate about this. Unlike Trix, fun isn’t just for kids. So let’s do this. Let’s sit down, let’s tune in, and let’s have fun.

Jon Hollins is the author of The Dragon Lords series. Fool's Gold and False Idols have both received starred reviews from Publisher's Weekly, and Bad Faith is due out next year. Jon Hollins is also a lie. He's a pseudonym for urban fantasy author Jonathan Wood, whose debut fantasy No Hero was described by Barnes and Noble as one of the top ten paranormal fantasies of the past ten years.

About The Dragon Lords: False Idols:

Guardians of the Galaxy meets TheHobbit in this rollicking fantasy adventure series.

The Dragons who once ruled over the land are dead.

The motley crew that stumbled through that revolution are rich and praised as saviors.

Everyone gets to live happily ever after, right?

Right?

Well, it might have worked out that way if the dragons in Kondorra had been the only ones. If they hadn't been just the tip of the spear about to fall upon the whole world...

HBO has just announced their new behind the scenes series, The Game Revealed, a look at how the latest action-packed season of the show Game of Thrones was made! And you can watch it right here!

See how Arya made the transformation to Walder Frey, get a glimpse at the real life location behind Dragonstone, and watch interviews with cast and crew members! Every Monday, HBO will be releasing a new episode for their subscribers, seven episodes in all, so stay tuned!

Not everyone appreciates comics. I learned this early in life. It only takes a few instances of getting your precious plucked from your hands on the school bus or at recess and getting torn up to the tune of laughter to teach you that (also, FYI, only takes a few instances of getting kicked in the nuts to teach people never to do that to you again. Just saying). But unless you've been living under a rock, you'll notice that there has been a resurgence in the popularity of comics recently. New comic conventions are popping up all over the place, and kids are once again dressing as superheroes for Halloween.

What caused this resurgence? Well, Netflix believes part of it is due to them.

After doing some market research, Netflix discovered that a widely diverse group of people have been watching their multiple series based on Marvel comics. Jessica Jones, Iron Fist, Daredevil, and Luke Cage viewers come from all kinds of backgrounds and love all kinds of different movies, from mysteries to romance, and of course, action flicks. What's bringing such a diverse group together to watch these series?

Well, part of it is by design. Netflix worked hard to create an algorithm that will recommend its shows to people who like other shows with similar aspects--even it they are in different genres.

"At Netflix, we know genres are just wrappers, which is why we work hard to create algorithms that help members break these pre-conceived notions and make it easier for them to find stories they'll love, even in seemingly unlikely places," says Todd Yellin from Netflix.

Overcoming genre bias hasn't only helped Netflix with the Marvel shows. Many viewers of the hit series Stranger Things and Black Mirror were brand new to the horror and science fiction world. How does Netflix know that? Because they can see that these particular viewers had never before watched something with the labels of horror and SF on Netflix.

So what are the key aspects of the shows that attract people who are fans of other genres? This is where tags come in handy. Shows and movies on Netflix are marked with tags like "buddy movie, cooking, adventure, conspiracy, friends, first love," etc. The possibilities are endless. Specifically, Netflix attributes these terms to the Marvel shows:

Daredevil: Anti-heroes and moral ambiguity

Jessica Jones: Sharp humor, strong females, dark crime

Luke Cage: Dangerous worlds, complex consequences

Iron Fist: Edgy, coming of age

Netflix

Once viewers watch these shows and realize they enjoy them, they go off and explore other things in the genres, starting with the comics, and branching off into other things like novels, action figures, and more. It's a win-win for people to explore new things, and Netflix is helping out with that. Sure, it sounds kind of Big Brother-ish, to have your viewing habits tracked, and if we were to fall into a 1984-like world, there could be some negative consequences. But for now, these algorithms are being used to steer fans toward new and exciting content. And who doesn't want that?

You've probably seen close-up images of our Sun, and even videos of the material moving around on our system's star. We've had these images for a long time, which isn't surprising. The Sun is pretty close to us, relatively speaking, and it's the largest body in the solar system. We've had the technology capable of looking at it (safely, of course) for many years.

Other stars, however, pose the problem of just being too far away to image very well. Some of them are many times the size of the Sun, but because of their distance, even with the best of telescopes, they show up as blurs of light. We can tell their size and temperatures due to their colors, distances, magnitudes of light, and how other objects interact with them, but not very much else.

Recently, however, scientists have used the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) at the European Southern Observatory to construct the most detailed image ever of a star other than our Sun. They also were able to make a map of the velocities of materials in the star's atmosphere, something, again, they were unable to do before with any star but our Sun.

Antares is a red supergiant star in the constellation Scorpius. It shines with a red glow from near the center of the constellation, and it's in the later stages of its life. Some day, probably long after you and I are dead, it will become a supernova. Astronomers at the VLTI at the Paranal Observatory in Chile are able to combine the light from up to four telescopes at the facility to make a virtual telescope that has the equivalent of a mirror 200 meters across. That's...really big. They can use this mega-Voltron telescope to see things at a much higher resolution than what can be seen with a single telescope. And that's how they were able to "see" this:

ESO/K. Ohnaka

Sure, it looks blurry and smeary, but remember, Antares is 550 light years away! It's a supergiant with a diameter about 700 times larger than our Sun, but seeing detail on something that far away is a huge step forward for astronomers, especially since Antares is a red supergiant with a mystery.

Stars begin life as normal, ordinary stars, like our Sun. When stars get older, if they have the right amount of mass, they become red giant stars. This means that they balloon out, cool off, and change color. Stars like our sun will balloon out, then after another period of time, will burn off enough energy to shrink again into a white dwarf, and then continue to cool until...well...poof. But a star with a huge amount of mass will become a red SUPERgiant, like Antares, which will eventually explode and become a supernova. Right now, Antares has a mass of about twelve Suns. But when it was formed, it's thought to have had a mass of fifteen Suns. Where did all that mass go?

"How stars like Antares lose mass so quickly in the final phase of their evolution has been a problem for over half a century," says lead astronomer on the project, Keiichi Ohnaka. "The VLTI is the only facility that can directly measure the gas motions in the extended atmosphere of Antares--a crucial step towards clarifying this problem. The real challenge is to identify what's driving the turbulent motions."

Because of the VLTI's awesome observing powers, scientists were not only able to get a good photo of the star. They were able to map the movement of the material that make the star up.

ESO/Ohnaka

Yep, this is the map. In order to read this map properly, you need to think in three dimensions. The red blobs are materials that are moving away from us, and the blue blobs are moving toward us. All the colors in between are moving in directions between (so green would be sort of coming toward, but at some angle, etc). The black ring is where measurements were not possible.

This is the first time these measurements were possible on a star other than the Sun. And scientists made a discovery: because they saw low density gases moving much further from the star than they had first predicted, in an extended atmosphere. Because of this movement, they have concluded this gas is not the result of convection, the way material usually moves around in stars, transferring from the core to the outer atmosphere. They can't explain it yet, but are exploring the possibility that a new, unknown process might be behind the movement of the gasses of the outer atmospheres of red supergiants.

"In the future, this observing technique can be applied to different types of stars to study their surfaces and atmospheres in unprecedented detail. This has been limited to just the Sun up to now," says Ohnaka. "Our work brings stellar astrophysics to a new dimension and opens an entirely new window to observe stars."

Excited about the eclipse, but didn't manage to get special glasses in time (or found they were all sold out through reputable dealers)? Never fear! You can still view the eclipse safely, AND you can do it using materials from around the house. And you can make it relatively quickly.

1. Take a long rectangular box, and cut a large hole in one end the shape of a rectangle. It doesn't have to be perfect. And if you tape two boxes together, to make a longer box, the image projected will be larger. Make sure the bottom of the box has a larger sized opening in it so you can work in it and fit your head into it.

2. Cut out a piece of aluminum foil slightly larger than the hole you just cut in the box. You want to make sure this foil is pretty smooth, not crinkly, so maybe don't use the cheapo stuff. Try to get it REALLY flat and smooth.

3. Tape the foil over the hole you cut in the box.

4. Use a pin or tack, and poke a tiny hole in the center of the foil. Again: tiny.

5. Then, tape a sheet of paper on the inside of the other end of the box. Regular office paper is fine.

During the eclipse, stand with your back to the sun, and hold the box so the FOIL end is facing the sun. Place the box over your head so you are facing the white paper "screen" and the pinhole in the foil is facing the sun behind you. Adjust the position of the box until the sun's rays shine through the pinhole and you can see a small reversed image of the solar eclipse projected onto the paper screen in front of you.

Sure, it's not perfect, it's small, but it's better than looking at the eclipse with unprotected eyes and going blind! And there are several other ways to make viewers as well, some better than others, and some more involved. It all depends on how far you want to go and what materials you have on hand.

Today's eclipse is happening 1:28 PM Eastern Time, and it will take a little more than an hour from the time the eclipse begins to the time when the sun is obscured. Then another hour will pass as the moon completes its pass and the eclipse is over. DO NOT LOOK AT THE SUN DIRECTLY DURING ANY OF THIS (or ever, really). Well, unless you WANT to go blind. I guess that's in your hands...

So much of modern physics relies on indirect observations and theorization. We can't SEE things that happen on a super small or super large scale. Mathematically, we can figure out how things SHOULD happen. But right now, humans just aren't at a point where we have the technology or know-how to "see" far beyond our own solar system, or smaller than the atoms that make us up. Every now and then, though, we have a breakthrough that lets us see that "Yes! Our math has been correct!" Or, "Oops, that didn't quite go according to our predictions..."

When Einstein came out with his Theory of General Relativity, it was based very much on math, theory, and a model of how he thought the universe should work. It's not a law yet--it hasn't been proven beyond a doubt--and there have been some strong arguments against it. But recently, there have been some observations of things in the universe that support his theory, and recently, scientists have found another bit of evidence pointing to the existence of general relativity!

For the first time, scientists have seen, via data from European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope and other telescopes, that the orbits of stars around the supermassive black hole in the center of our galaxy show effects predicted by the theory of general relativity, albeit subtly.

Classical physics, the theories put forth by people like Isaac Newton, predict that bodies behave in a certain way. And for the most part, for our intents and purposes as humans on Earth, they DO behave that way. We can calculate the trajectory of a missile launched at a certain speed in a certain direction. We know how hard something is going to hit the ground when it's dropped from a certain height. If I leave station A at one time at a certain speed, and my friend leaves station B at one time at a certain speed, we can figure out where we'd meet. For hundreds of years, we thought that these laws not only governed how things worked on Earth, but how they behaved throughout the whole universe. However, once we started to understand how light travels, and how things behave on a huge scale, beyond what we can directly observe, and started dealing with things that had very large masses, we started to have questions about how things actually behaved versus how they SHOULD behave according to Newton's laws. That's what prompted Einstein's studies. If we account for curved space-time of general relativity, physics behaves differently than in a "planar" system. We can see these effects in our own solar system, as well as in larger systems.

One of the stars orbiting the central black hole in the Milky Way, S2, exhibited a tiny change in motion in its orbit, a change that is consistent with how Einstein predicted general relativity would affect a body in orbit around a supermassive object. This is the first time scientists have observed this effect, and it's pretty exciting to see decades of laboratory and simulation work exhibited by actual objects in the galaxy.

Until now, scientists haven't been able to make these observations. They lacked the equipment necessary to make the ultra-accurate measurements in star positions necessary to make any judgments. But now, thanks to the Very Large Telescope's near-infrared adaptive optics instruments, scientists could measure S2's position both in its orbit close to the black hole, and when it was further away.

"During the course of our analysis, we realized that to determine relativistic effects for S2, one definitely needs to know the full orbit to very high precision," team leader Andreas Eckart at the University of Cologne said. Analysis of the data from the VLT has given scientists this more precise information, as well as more information about the black hole itself.

"It is very reassuring that S2 shows relativistic effects as expected on the basis of its proximity to the extreme mass concentration at the center of the Milky Way. This opens up an avenue for more theory and experiments in this sector of science," says Vladimir Karas from the Academy of Sciences in Prague, the Czech Republic.

This observation is just the beginning! In 2018, the star S2 will be making a very close approach to the supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way, and scientists plan on using the new GRAVITY instrument installed on the Very Large Telescope to help measure the orbit much more precisely than is now possible. This will not only help scientists make more accurate readings, but could help them see deviations from general relativity that could help us understand even MORE physics!

If you are a friend or fan of mine, you know I'm a pretty smart person. I went to school for astrophysics. My husband has his degree in mechanical engineering, and has worked at optical companies. We aren't strangers to the world of optics and lenses and what we should be looking for when we buy things like solar eclipse viewing glasses.

Yet, we were still duped.

Nerds and laypeople alike are pretty stoked--as they should be!--about the upcoming solar eclipse on Monday, August 21. As most school kids know, though, in order to see the eclipse, you need some special equipment. Looking at a solar eclipse with your naked eye, through sunglasses, even through things like welders' glass and things like that, will lead to permanent eye damage. Your retinas don't have pain receptors. You can't tell that they are being damaged. But the light from a solar eclipse is so focused and bright that it will sear your retinas and can cause blindness, and at the very least, irreversible damage. People have used things like pinhole cameras and other indirect methods of viewing eclipses for years now. But more recently, people started using solar eclipse glasses, the cheapest of which look like paper 3-D glasses, but that have lenses that look completely black.

Legit solar eclipse viewing glasses should be so dark you can't see ANYTHING through them, not even the lights in your house, nothing. And the lenses should meet the transmission requirements of ISO 12312-2. But here's the thing...in the days where everyone owns a printer, where anything can be mass produced, etc, there is a HUGE influx of fake glasses out there, that are CLAIMING to be ISO certified, that have the logo on them, etc, but aren't.

When we were buying our family's glasses, we did what we thought was due diligence, and to be honest, eclipse glasses fraud wasn't high on our concern list. Who the heck would do that, putting people's eyes at risk?

Well, it turns out, quite a few people and companies.

We bought our glasses from Amazon. We have Prime, and it was convenient. We got a 10 pack of the paper framed kind, and they looked like the ones Bill Nye advertised via the Planetary Society. When they arrived, I put them aside, to wait for the big day.

Then a friend sent me a link to a news article warning people about the fake glasses.

My eyeballs are important to me, and I had misgivings about using the glasses in the first place. But this prompted me to inspect my glasses closely.

Mind you, the American Astronomical society has a list of their approved vendors and manufacturers of eclipse viewers, and top of the list is American Paper Optics. The picture below is an image of the glasses I bought. Look at the manufacturer:

These are the glasses I received, Soluna.

OK, so far so good, right? But wait. Look at the second word on the verbiage there. "Conforms TWO?" That's a doozy of a typo.

I went to the website listed, and I went to American Paper Optics's website separately. They aren't the same, but the contact on each is the same and the phone numbers match, the addresses match...That's because they are both the same company, the legitimate American Paper Optics company. All the info on these glasses is CORRECT.

BUT WAIT.

Because American Paper Optics knows about the fraud company, they kindly provided a picture of what the inside of their glasses SHOULD look like. Here it is:

What the REAL American Paper Optics glasses should look like.

Notice two things: There is no typo on these, AND there is a barcode. There is no barcode on the glasses we bought that claim to be from American Paper Optics. But, you know, maybe that barcode is only on particular models....

The other thing that tipped me off was that the name of the glasses we bought, Soluna, is nowhere on American Paper Optics's page. There are pictures of several other glasses with different printing, all legitimately made by American Paper Optics, but Soluna is nowhere to be seen. Upon further inspection of the glasses, I noticed that the lenses were squarish. Like this:

My fake/fraudulent glasses.

Now look at the picture of the real glasses, above. See how the sides of the lenses are curved? ALL American Paper Optics glasses have CURVED sides to the lenses. And indeed, inspection of their website shows this:

Comparison of certified glasses versus fraudulent ones.

I don't know about you, but I was pretty pissed when I saw this. So, back to Amazon I went, to report the company we bought these glasses from. Only....there was a problem.

The company was gone.

Of course they were gone. They probably put the glasses up for a couple days, then disappeared, then popped up under a new name, disappeared again. Selling these fraudulent glasses claiming to be from a company they are not IS in fact a felony, and having the certification info on there when they were never checked is against international law.

But most important of all, there is absolutely NO way of knowing if these glasses will keep your eyes safe, because they aren't tested and the info on them is fake.

Please, PLEASE, PLEASE only get your glasses from places that the American Astronomical Society, NASA, and the Planetary Society have deemed safe. Do NOT buy them from Amazon.

Here is a list of places deemed safe and legitimate. If you Google the names, you will find the correct sites for them, but I've provided a link for the first:

Sadly, the world seems to have become about the quickest way to make a buck. Yes, the glasses on Amazon are cheaper, but it is NOT worth the risk to your eyes. The damage to your eyes from looking at an eclipse is not repairable and is permanent. Pay a bit more and get the actual certified glasses. Make sure you can't see ANYTHING through them. Not a thing. Not the lights around the house, nothing. If you can see anything, throw them out. Or do what I'm doing and return them, reporting the company to Amazon and whatever authorities I can find.

Theodora Goss is perhaps best known for her award winning short fiction and poetry. She has a lovely social media presence, as well, where she posts pictures of her travels, flowers, and other things that I personally have found refreshing.

Theodora's series on "The Fairytale Heroine's Journey" is also quite popular. It started, I believe as a series of blog posts, became an article in Faerie Magazine, and she also wrote a more academic paper on it as well, exploring Campbell's mythological hero's journey in the context of female fairy tale characters, exploring ways their journeys might differ from Campbell's male counterparts.

I was very excited when I heard that Theodora had a full-length novel coming out. Having read some of her shorter work, I enjoyed her use of language and couldn't wait to see what she did in a longer form.

I was not disappointed.

The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter(Saga Press) is a fantastical mystery of mad science and secret societies. It takes the tale of Doctor Jeckyll and Mister Hyde and turns it on its head, delving deeper into the story and joining it with others. Some familiar faces in this book include Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, and names include Frankenstein, Moreau, and more.

Readers with a more literary bent will appreciate all of the author's nods to the classics, and her mastery of language and prose. Those readers who are in it for fun will enjoy a mysterious adventure that will remind them of everything they loved about Penny Dreadful or League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Theodora Goss has accomplished no easy feat in creating a work that can be enjoyed by a wide range of readers, with a lyrical style that is at the same time unpretentious and a joy to read.

I recently had the opportunity to ask Theodora Goss some questions about this book and her other work. Please welcome Theodora to the Once and Future Podcast blog!

Theodora Goss: It's about Mary Jekyll, Diana Hyde, Beatrice Rappaccini, Catherine Moreau, and Justine Frankenstein, who find each other in late nineteenth-century London. It starts when Mary learns that her father's former assistant, the notorious Mr. Hyde, might still be alive. She wants to know if there's still a reward for information leading to his capture, so she visits Sherlock Holmes, who lives across Regents Park from the Jekyll residence. Holmes is trying to solve a series of gruesome murders that have recently taken place in Whitechapel. Mary becomes entangled in his investigation, while her own leads her to Diana (Hyde's daughter), Beatrice, Catherine, and Justine, all the results of shocking experiments by mad scientists. In the course of the book, these five very unusual young women learn about themselves and their origins, which have more to do with those murders than they imagine.

MRM: You draw from several tales in this book—Sherlock Holmes, Frankenstein, Doctor Jeckyll and Mister Hyde. Do you have a favorite story from the Victorian time period, or perhaps a favorite monster?

TG: I love all the monsters! I'm not sure I have a favorite, but I do really love Carmilla, Sheridan Le Fanu's female monster from the novella of the same name. She's a beautiful vampire who lives in Styria, and I love her because she's so complicated. She preys on young women, particularly one named Laura, and at one point she tells Laura that becoming a vampire is like becoming a butterfly. Girls are caterpillars, but some day, she implies, they too can become magnificent. I love the idea of the natural life cycle of a Victorian girl as including a vampire phase! Carmilla is one of my favorite stories, but I also love other fairly obscure ones like The Great God Pan and The Jewel of Seven Stars. I suspect they're mostly read by Victorianists, people who study the period professionally, nowadays.

MRM: What were some special challenges, if any, when you were writing this book?

TG: The biggest challenge was trying to get my characters to move through a late nineteenth-century world in an authentic way. Hopefully I succeeded! I had to think about how money was used, how people traveled around the city of London, where locations were relative to one another. What things might have smelled like . . . I also had to think about these things from the perspective of the characters. For example, we might have found late nineteenth-century London quite smelly, but people living at that time would have been used to it. Another challenge was trying to write from the perspectives of five different female characters. I wanted to make sure that Mary, Diana, Beatrice, Catherine, and Justine were each distinct.

MRM: Something I liked about The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter is the feminine slant to stories I was familiar with. I love monster stories, but so few of the Victorian stories have women or girls in them. I think women have a special perspective in these types of stories, and I enjoyed the different perspective you gave. Could you talk a bit about why you chose to write about female characters in the context of older stories that had all male casts? Was there anything personal about the choice?

TG: Actually, three of my female monsters are from the original texts! Beatrice is the central character in "Rappaccini's Daughter," a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne. I just gave her more of a voice and a more detailed backstory. Catherine really does appear in The Island of Dr. Moreau, although not under that name: she's the anonymous puma woman created by Moreau who ends up killing him. And Justine is the bride Victor Frankenstein starts creating for his male monster. He never creates her--instead, he disassembles her and throws her body parts into the sea. That scene, more than any other perhaps, inspired me to write this book. I felt that his female monster ought to exist as well. In my version, she's made from the body of the maid Justine Moritz, who is hanged for the murder of Frankenstein's younger brother (a murder really committed by the male monster). Mary and Diana are the only ones I made up, and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde does have a dearth of female characters--but strangely enough, Hyde himself is described several times in feminine terms. I chose to write about female monsters because they never get to say very much--they usually exist to be fought and destroyed. I thought they deserved their own stories.

MRM: You also write a lot of shorter fiction, much of which has appeared on tor.com. Do you have a preferred length in which to write? Do you find that you write different types of stories between your shorter and longer works?

TG: I really don't have a preferred length: I write everything from poetry to novels. But yes, I do write differently at different lengths. In shorter fiction, you can do things that are more experimental. You can be more allusive, more cryptic. You can write without a real plot. Of course you could do that in a novel as well, if you were prepared to have readers get mad at you! But readers (and perhaps editors) seem to tolerate more experimentation in shorter fiction. And poetry I write just because that's the way my mind works. It allows me to really focus on each line, the sound of each word--in a way I can't at novel length.

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MRM: Something a lot of writers struggle with is voice. You have a very unique writing voice that reminds me of fairy tales and poetry. Do you find this comes naturally, or did you decide that you wanted to write stories like that, and therefore honed your voice in that way?

TG: Thank you! To be honest, I don't really know what my writing voice sounds like. I listened to myself on a podcast recently, to see if I was making sense, and realized that I actually talk the way I write in this book. So I think it may be just me? One thing that may affect my voice is that even though I've been speaking English since I was seven, it was my third language, after Hungarian and French. I learned a lot of English from reading it, and I read a lot of classic British children's books as well as a lot of fairy tales. So I'm sure their rhythms appear in my writing. Also, I wrote poetry long before I wrote prose, and I still approach projects with the assumption that every word matters--which can be a problem in a 120,000-word novel!

MRM: You’ve done a lot of work on your blog, and even had an article in Faerie Magazine, about what you call the Fairy Tale Heroine’s Journey. Could you tell us a bit about that? Could this be adapted to work for any type of story, in any genre?

TG: I also gave a paper on the idea at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts! The basic idea is that, among fairy tales that focus on a heroine, many share a specific structure. It includes steps such as the heroine receiving gifts (think of Sleeping Beauty and the fairies) and being lost in the dark woods (like Snow White after she is driven from the castle). Even though not all stories about fairy-tale heroines share this structure, the stories that have come down to us--the ones we still read and that are made into Disney movies--tend to. You can also see this pattern in Jane Eyre, since Charlotte Brontë incorporates a fairy tale substructure. It informs the way women think about their own lives--we often assume there's something wrong if our lives don't follow that pattern. It could be adapted to any kind of work, and writers can also write against it, against expectations. After all, not all fairy tales about heroines follow this pattern. There are other patterns out there.

MRM: You are an academic as well as a writer. Do you find that one career interferes with the other at times? Is it hard to shift gears from perhaps a more critical mindset to a more creative one?

TG: Yes, unfortunately! I don't find the two types of writing interfere with one another--I can move pretty easily between them. But teaching, which is my job, does interfere with writing. I love both, and I'm grateful that I get to teach writing--I can't think of a better job. But sometimes writing has to be put aside because I have lessons to plan or papers to grade. Many writers face the challenge of balancing the needs of the primary job with the desire to write. And the writers who write full time have the even harder job of making a career of it, of paying for rent and food and healthcare from their writing. Being a writer is and has always been a challenge. We are all in the long tradition of writers and artists who have struggled to produce, to live while producing, to stay sane and healthy through it all.

MRM: Have you read anything recently that you’d recommend to our readers?

TG: Actually, the two books I've read most recently are My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier and Little, Big by John Crowley. I tend to be a fairly eclectic reader: What I really look for is a kind of twistiness of plot or theme, united with a clarity and beauty of style. Both of those books have that. I would recommend both, as well as both writers, to anyone. I'll add just one more to make it a trio: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke. When I'm not sure whether I'm allowed to write like that . . . meaning, to take certain risks in writing, I think about writers like Clarke and Crowley, who take a lot of risks. I want to be as brave as they are.

Theodora Goss was born in Hungary and spent her childhood in various European countries before her family moved to the United States. Although she grew up on the classics of English literature, her writing has been influenced by an Eastern European literary tradition in which the boundaries between realism and the fantastic are often ambiguous. Her publications include the short story collection In the Forest of Forgetting (2006); Interfictions (2007), a short story anthology coedited with Delia Sherman; Voices from Fairyland (2008), a poetry anthology with critical essays and a selection of her own poems; The Thorn and the Blossom (2012), a novella in a two-sided accordion format; and the poetry collection Songs for Ophelia (2014). Her work has been translated into nine languages, including French, Japanese, and Turkish. She has been a finalist for the Nebula, Crawford, Locus, Seiun, and Mythopoeic Awards, and on the Tiptree Award Honor List. Her prose-poem "Octavia is Lost in the Hall of Masks" (2003) won the Rhysling Award and her short story "Singing of Mount Abora" (2007) won the World Fantasy Award.

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